The dashboard serves two main purposes: making you feel part of the bigger Restarters network, and helping to encourage you to get active in the network by providing quick access to key activities.
We got feedback that you as users would like to feel more part of the bigger picture when using the Fixometer, rather than seeing just your own group’s activity (which you can still see of course, on your groups’ pages). You suggested we could more communication within the software as to why it’s helpful to collect repair data. And also that you would like to hear more narrative stories about repairs, not just the quantitative stuff.
The intention of the dashboard is to give you an at-a-glance picture of what is going on across the wider network, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and to give you easy access to key activities you would want to undertake to get engaged both in your local area and globally.
Some current items we have on the dashboard:
global impact stats for the whole network
links to discussion threads in talk.restarters.net - where a lot of the narrative stories will sit in future
a changing selection of posts from the Restarters wiki, where you can learn and share repair tips
links to our latest community-oriented blog posts
links to useful materials for getting started in community repair
links to upcoming events to RSVP to, and links to recent events to help add device data
We want to improve the dashboard based on what you would find useful - let us know what would be useful for you, and what you think would be useful for other users, both new and long-timers!
A dashboard block that makes any active events that you are part of prominent would make a lot of sense - if you log in during an event, probably the main thing you want to see is a quick link to that event (possibly directly to add/edit a device.)
Possible improvement to the Wiki block could be to allow selection of ‘Featured’ pages - e.g. @philip just created a whole new page on kettles and electric urns, would be good to flag that to the network.
In other circumstances, we might want to promote a page that is specific to some recent news item, e.g. fixing Apple keyboards or similar.
Downside of this idea is that someone has to maintain it / update it reasonably regularly, otherwise it starts to look a bit stale. Could give the ‘featured’ item a sell-by date, at which point it is no longer displayed.
The “Upcoming Events” bloc currently displays events ‘close to you’, based on the location info posted in your profile - but not upcoming events from groups you’re part of. Ideally, it would make sense to have both, or if we have to choose between these, events from groups you’re member of would make more sense. Close to you would be preferable in case people haven’t joined a group yet
I notice the link to ‘view the materials’ in the Getting Started in Community Repair box points to the guidelines at the moment. Could it instead point to the Restart Party Kit?
Currently if you’re a host it should link to the Restart Party Kit, if you’re a Restarter it links to the guidelines (IIRC this was a stopgap in the absence of another page to point to - to be revisited cc @Janet@ugo ).
If you’re an Admin… you see what you would see if you’re a Restarter, as we haven’t really laid out what an Admin should see yet.
Ideally, events from groups you have joined, followed by events from local groups you haven’t joined, indicating this with something along the line of ‘And some other local events’. Both informations are important and the distinction is important too to encourage users to join other local groups.
how many or how far in the future can be dictated by the space available.
If you can get access to travel time APIs, I’d suggest you find locations that are within an hour travel time.
Again I’d suggest ordering by date
and display how many fits the space.
Yes.
Either use geolocation, or ask the user for a location. That makes it directly relevant to the user to provide a location at that point.
Again use geolocation or ask the user.
I think asking to join a group there might make the UI confusion. I’d just list separately events for the groups joined and the other local events so the user understand the difference, but I’ll leave joining groups in the groups’ pages.
Yes, there’s currently an inconsistent behaviour. If you have put a location, in the Dashboard you see local upcoming events, which is great. If instead you head to /party, for instance by clicking on RSVP to an event on “Getting started”, you don’t see any upcoming event if not part of a group.
Ideally this page should also include all local events by default, separated from the ones from your groups. And in case you’re not part of a group it should simply say “Join a group” rather than saying that no upcoming events in the groups you’re part of.
Would you agree also that on the list of events page, it should only show past events for your groups? And have a link to see all past events. This is then more consistent with the upcoming events.
As suggested by @Ellie - the ability to have a temporary call-to-action block on the dashboard could be useful - as an example, one about upcoming Fixfest.
Would be good to think about what kind of elements we’d want in there (e.g. a header, a paragraph of content, and a link somewhere else?), and whether it should be targeted to particular types of users and geographic locations.
